I completed a very similar project with a relational flat file database system, and used a third party program called PDFever (www.pdefever.de) that allowed much more flexibility, and integrated very well with my perl program.

Also the creator of the program (Zhigang Li) is very helpful with PDF troubleshooting.

For a hacker such as myself, programming for PDF (which IMHO is very obscure), it was a relief to find a program that allowed me lots of flexibility and very little time required to learn the PDF aspect.

The Perl::CreatePDF mod is good, but I found the flexibility was lacking, and there was no support. (Just my 2 cents)